


Brûlé par l’amour du beau

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: M/M, Poverty, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maître d’Anton knows Maître Desmoulins’ irregular ways and at first he’s unsurprised that Camille isn’t coming to the café.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brûlé par l’amour du beau

**Author's Note:**

> Some allusions to issues surrounding consent.
> 
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 

D’Anton is not as rich as he’d like to be, but his personal accommodations have always been superior to those of Maître Desmoulins, who is so impecunious that from time to time he cannot afford anywhere to live at all. Fortunate Georges-Jacques has more wine, better wine, a wife to order the meals, and fires on his hearths: in the sparse, unending cold of the year’s turn, such advantages mean a lot to him.

When Camille has a room, it is always bare, icy, dusty, and choked with bits of paper that have been scribbled over on both sides. There are ink stains on the floor of any room he occupies, and frequently on the walls too: d’Anton suspects him of throwing his inkwell about when rage takes hold of him.

The streets are like iron and Camille comes into the café as though his feet hurt him: the thick wind snatches at his garments as he turns to close the door. Anyone can see it costs him an effort.

Fabre says, ‘Delicious frailty. I’m mortally certain – and I use the word advisedly – that he has a consumption.’

Georges-Jacques frowns at him. He does not like to worry about things like that, but he can’t help remembering that Camille told him, two or three years ago now, about a little sister who had died thus. 

‘Camille,’ he says, closing his mind to the thought. ‘Have a glass of this.’

He will not allow Fabre to be right on that score: and yet the air that Camille has, which Fabre deems frail, is not unappealing. Camille’s eyes look blacker than ever nowadays.

*

Maître d’Anton knows Maître Desmoulins’ irregular ways and at first he’s unsurprised that Camille isn’t coming to the café. He might be writing; he might even have gone home to Guise to escape the Paris winter and forgotten to tell anyone. D’Anton takes the world as he finds it. He does not care to regard himself as somebody who might be susceptible to Camille: yet he thinks of him often with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

By the smallest of increments, they have come to know each other exceptionally well. Camille goes to Georges-Jacques’ apartment, nineteen times out of twenty: that’s how things work. Yet with one thing and another – few of them articulated even to himself – Maître d’Anton finds that he is walking into the icy, ramshackle premises which constitute Camille’s last known address, and beginning the long climb to the top floor.

Camille’s door is ajar. Maître d’Anton, breathing hard after a multitude of steps, looks through it and goes still.

It’s easy to forget how poor Camille is: when he’s in the room with you, you simply don’t look at his worn-out clothes; it doesn’t matter that he never pays for anything because no one grudges a cup of wine to Camille Desmoulins, and he gets drunk quickly so it’s actually quite cheap.

When d’Anton looks into Camille’s room, though, he is no longer able to forget. It’s bare as the granaries are, out in the country. A low, narrow bed with a straw mattress, and a damaged valise lying near it – which must, Georges-Jacques thinks, hold Camille’s spare shirt and his nightgown, for there is nothing else in the room at all except the papers. These are scattered all over the floor, and that is everything: Camille’s effects come to no more than this. 

No coffee pot, Georges-Jacques thinks: no cup, no cloak, neither ewer nor basin, no blankets on the bed, no hat, no chamber pot, no boots, no gloves, not even any books. Surely Camille had possessed books once? Even he, febrile luminary of Louis-le-Grand, could not know every book off by heart. Georges-Jacques remembers seeing them, in another garret. He thinks: they have been pawned, or sold; he must have broken his heart over it, yet he said nothing to me.

He would like to sweep Camille downstairs and into a cab: to take him home and install him in their apartment for good. The arrangement would doubtless be irritating at times, and Camille would probably listen to them on the other side of the wall and regale Fabre with lubricious imitations of d’Anton’s passion. But a warm place to sleep –

D’Anton keeps Camille overnight from time to time, when the streets are glazed with ice and it’s reached the small hours, Camille half-sick with drink and he, d’Anton, sitting in his chair like a monument. On those nights he dares not send Camille out among the footpads and the whores for fear they’ll cut that little throat of his to get the two or three coins which are all he ever has about him. 

Gabrielle doesn’t complain, but d’Anton wants something more than these little respites. He almost wants to adopt Camille, as though he were indeed the elder brother they both half-pretend he is: then Camille will no longer be alone in Paris and shuttling between women’s bedrooms like a silk-seller; he will no longer turn up red-eyed on days when his father writes to him that they are ashamed and that he, Jean-Nicolas, gets funny looks in the streets of Guise on account of that mad boy of his, the derelict firstborn who has wasted every sacrifice.

Camille hasn’t even seen him. Georges-Jacques looks down at him lying on his front on the bare boards, and wonders how he can stand it, in such cold. For the first minute or two, he thinks that Camille is in tears, and knows that he should go to console him, but then Camille’s hand moves again, where it is clenched in his hair, and Georges watches, fascinated and mute. 

He is only playing with his loose black curls as a woman might, but since he is unaware that Georges is there to be an audience, there is no coquetry in the action. Indeed, his hand and wrist look tight, tense, as though it is a game he can’t afford to lose.

D’Anton has lived in the country and seen horses groomed. He has watched the Paris women with their lapdogs, fussing and patting. Camille, he thinks, is not trying to beautify himself but to conjure up in this freezing little room some sort of comfort, even if there is no one to give it but himself.

He says, ‘Camille.’

Camille leaps upright and draws into himself all at once. Crouched on the floor, he looks at d’Anton with huge dark eyes and says, ‘You scared me.’

‘What were you doing?’ D’Anton doesn’t trouble to apologise.

‘Thinking.’

The stutter is bad today: Camille’s answers become abrupt when he is having a lot of trouble with his words, and now he looks suddenly and intensely unhappy. D’Anton takes pity on him. 

‘You look ridiculous on the floor,’ he says, his tone kinder than the words. ‘Get up, come on. You’re too pensive for your own good. But even with that grave sin on your soul – I might like you today.’

The phrase has meaning between them, but to Camille’s own surprise as much as d’Anton’s, he turns his black eyes to the board floor and says softly, ‘I’m cold.’

‘And no wonder, lying there.’ D’Anton’s voice is abrupt. ‘Get up and come over here.’

This time, Camille does what he’s told to do, and he lets Georges-Jacques put one arm round his shoulders and press him close.

D’Anton is shocked by the temperature of Camille’s skin: and the bones under his clothes are sharp as twigs. 

‘I’ll take you home with me,’ he says. ‘Two nights, or three, even. Get you something to eat, and we can drink my Bordeaux.’

Camille understands more than has been said. He stretches up on highest tiptoe, leaning against his friend – Georges-Jacques d’Anton, lawyer and human furnace – and says, ‘Will you eat me up?’

It’s another phrase with meaning, and d’Anton smiles. ‘Avidly,’ he says. He doesn’t let go, but picks up one of Camille’s hands and sucks two thin, frozen fingers into his mouth. Camille is shivering like a scared pony, and d’Anton thinks: this won’t do. He has no intention of freezing his cock off in Camille’s dreadful garret.

He returns Camille’s fingers, solicitously if rather roughly wiping them dry on the back of his friend’s threadbare coat. ‘What were you doing to your hair?’ he says. ‘Do you get yourself off like that?’

Camille shakes his head and d’Anton suspects he would be blushing if the cold hadn’t stolen all the blood from his narrow face.

‘It’s not that sort of,’ he begins, ‘It’s not – it makes me feel better, I suppose. I was – ’

D’Anton waits for the sentence to end but it does not. ‘What?’ he says.

‘I thought my father’s letter might come today.’

‘But you hate those letters. They make you – ’ It would not be altogether kind to complete the sentence, he thinks.

Camille knows as well as Georges-Jacques does. He says, ‘Yes, but I – I asked him for money. Even two louis d’ors, if he can’t spare more. I haven’t – I can’t – ’

D’Anton puts his hand under Camille’s chin, tips his face up so that he can examine it more closely. 

‘You’ve nothing?’ he says at last, and Camille shakes his head, two little jerks of the chin d’Anton is holding.

‘What have you been doing, then? Why on earth didn’t you tell me? Silly boy, you know I’d – ’

‘I know,’ Camille says quickly. ‘I was going to tell you. I was.’

‘You should have come to the café; you know I’d have – but where have you been?

‘I stayed with Elisée for three days. He had a fire. But he’s left Paris for a bit now. And then Fabre let me go into the theatre without paying and stay there nearly all night, once.’

D’Anton thinks, I’ll have Fabre’s skin. Why didn’t he tell me? 

‘When they said I had to go, I just walked about until it got light,’ Camille says.

‘That’s four nights; what about the rest?’ D’Anton looks half-angry. ‘You can’t have been staying here, you’d have frozen to death.’

Camille remembers the day when he thought about going to Georges-Jacques. In some ways, he hasn’t much pride. He never minds that Georges-Jacques pays for their wine, and he doesn’t mind – indeed, rather likes – being spoken to as he is. 

Somehow there is a great difference, though, between staying with Georges because you’ve been drinking together or you’ve stayed late at the court or somebody beat you and his eyes couldn’t hide their worry – between any of those, and knocking on his door to say you’ve not a sou to your name.

‘I didn’t want to – to bother you,’ he improvises, aware that this excuse will not pacify d’Anton, who is perfectly familiar with Camille’s willingness to engage in advantageous bothering.

D’Anton nods and waits, certain there is more.

‘I went to Maître Perrin,’ Camille gets out at long last. He isn’t weeping, but his voice does not want to work.

D’Anton lets go of him and steps back. 

‘Christ, Camille,’ he says. ‘Why on earth – but I suppose it’s no use telling you. But you can’t have wanted to.’

‘I like him,’ Camille says stubbornly, and in its way, this is true enough: it is not an absolute lie.

For a long moment, d’Anton stands still. He is less eager to touch Camille than he was, yet strangely the desire, which didn’t feel complicated before, is giving way to something more like yearning. He is less aroused; more moved.

Camille has closed his eyes, but he feels the returning warmth of d’Anton’s arms. ‘Then it went wrong,’ he says, as Georges pulls one of his curls, ‘And I had to leave.’

His friend says nothing. Camille leans against Georges-Jacques as though he is very tired, and listens to his own breathing. 

He says, ‘I went to the Palais-Royal. I thought – I’m not sure.’

Suddenly Georges-Jacques doesn’t want to hear. He considers himself a tolerant man: he has listened to hours of Camille’s silly talk about throwing himself into the river, to the chatter about Annette Duplessis interrupted by renditions of Camille’s poems, and to thoroughly wretched tears when the post comes from Guise and Camille’s father oversets him anew. But he does not want to hear this: without hearing it, he guesses something like the truth.

‘Are you hurt?’ he says sharply, and watches Camille shake his head. ‘All right, look. I don’t want to know what you’ve been up to; even my legendary prurience has its limits, for God’s sake. Give me that bag. We’re going to my apartment; at least it’s warm.’

Camille objects neither to the forced cessation of his story nor to d’Anton’s commandeering of his valise. Outside the streets are blue with ice, but a cautious cab is edging past: it stops at d’Anton’s gesture, and d’Anton finds that he has instinctively assisted Camille into it, as though he were a maiden and not a starveling black-eyed lawyer.

Nobody can see them in the cab, and Camille lays his curly head on d’Anton’s shoulder in the hope that he will be forgiven. 

After three or four minutes, his friend’s huge fingers tweak at his ear, and d’Anton says, ‘You’ll be the death of me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Camille says. He is sorry, a little, for being a confirmed sinner, and he is sorry that he lied and said that he wasn’t hurt, for the truth is that his throat stings – and yet it’s likely no worse than if he had spent the preceding days with Georges-Jacques, who likes all the same things and, being his friend, is allowed to like them.

‘Your father will write,’ d’Anton says.

‘Maybe he’ll send me a lot of money this time,’ Camille says. ‘Or perhaps Claude will die, and I can marry Annette.’ He does not really wish Claude ill, but it would solve several problems for him, would it not?

Or perhaps Gabrielle will die, he thinks, and I could marry you. They’re words he can never say, even if he could talk far better than he can: d’Anton would think him wicked at least, perhaps mad. 

From now on, he supposes that Georges will expect him to come round when he has no money left, and perhaps sometimes he will. And yet in certain ways the d’Antons’ apartment is the last place in all of Paris where he wants to show himself a beggar. Better to go to Annette, perhaps; better to suck a stranger in the freezing shadows where men like him go for no good purpose. D’Anton smells of wine and smoke and sugar, and Camille’s heart is paining him, deep in his breast.

  


_Les amants des prostituées_  
 _Sont heureux, dispos et repus;_  
 _Quant à moi, mes bras sont rompus_  
 _Pour avoir étreint des nuées._

**Author's Note:**

> Title and concluding quotation from Baudelaire’s ‘Les Plaintes d’un Icare’.


End file.
